David Suchet offers new observations about the Queen of Crime's 11-day
vanishing act in Perspectives: The Mystery of Agatha Christie, says Matthew
Sweet.

Saturday, 4th December 1926. A green Morris Cowley lies with its bull nose buried in bushes at the end of a dirt track near Guildford. The police issue a description of the missing owner: “Aged 35, height 5ft 7in, hair reddish and shingled, eyes grey, complexion fair. Well-built, dressed in grey and dark grey cardigan, small green velour hat, wearing a platinum ring with one pearl, but no wedding ring.”

In 1926,Agatha Christie was the author of six detective novels. Today, she is a major 20th-century writer in whom scholarship has shown barely a flicker of interest: a literary giant hidden in plain sight. Her 11-day vanishing act, however, has kept her visible to biographers and film-makers. Michael Apted’s Agatha (1979) has her disoriented by electroconvulsive therapy. Jared Cade’s Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days (1999) contends that she staged her disappearance to embarrass her adulterous husband. A 2008 episode of Doctor Who depicts her traumatised after encountering a giant wasp that has emerged from the birth canal of Felicity Kendal. On Sunday night, David Suchet – TV’s Poirot – will use ITV’s Perspectives series to offer the most obvious observation it is possible to make about the business: that Christie’s vanishing resembles something from her own fiction.

Suchet’s film takes a traditional line: an anxious Agatha booked into a hotel in Harrogate seeking respite from her poisoned marriage. “I imagine most of us have got to the stage where you can’t think straight anymore,” he says. “I know I have.” As the Queen of Crime remained silent about her disappearance, we may have exhausted what can be said about it. Its meaning as a public event, however, remains an open field – and a fact mentioned in passing by Suchet strikes me as particularly interesting.

There were those, it seems, who believed that the whole affair was a publicity stunt. While Christie recuperated in Las Palmas, Parliamentary questions were asked about the cost of the investigation into her disappearance. The Home Secretary, William Joynson-Hicks, put the total at £12 10s. The answer did not satisfy William Lunn, Labour MP for Rothwell. “Who,” he inquired, “is going to compensate the thousands of people who were deliberately misled by this cruel hoax?” No answer was forthcoming. A fortnight later, however, Joynson-Hicks revised the figure, claiming the investigation had cost nothing.

Why, you might wonder, was Christie’s disappearance a potential political controversy? It helps to know the history of those in the frame. William Lunn was a former pit-boy who represented a mining constituency. He believed in the nationalisation of the coal industry, the railways and the banks – and that a General Strike might help to secure those aims. Joynson-Hicks was his political opposite: a vehement anti-Bolshevist who believed that the General Strike of May 1926 was a plot hatched in Moscow.

Though it is little read today, one of Christie’s most popular books of this period was The Secret Adversary (1922), a thriller about a Russian conspiracy to plunge England into anarchy by persuading the Labour Party to support a General Strike. By the end, the enemy within is cowed: “Straggling processions, singing the Red Flag, wandered through the streets in a more or less aimless manner,” writes Christie. “The Labour leaders were forced to admit that they had been used as a catspaw.” It’s hard to imagine a work more attuned to Joynson-Hicks’s sensibility.

The sentiment, however, would have nauseated William Lunn – who may have sensed an opportunity for political advantage when, after a pointless police search, the author of The Secret Adversary turned up in a hotel twenty miles from his West Yorkshire constituency. This Parliamentary exchange, I suspect, is really a debate about not one but two events of 1926: Christie’s eleven days in December and the nine days in May for which the General Strike endured.

We don’t think of Christie as a political author. Perhaps we should. Her views, though, may not make for cosy Sunday viewing. The buzz of anti-Semitism is loud in her fiction of the 1920s, with its references to “Hebraic people” and “yellow-faced financiers” – and this is more than the thoughtless transmission of cultural background noise. Christopher Hitchens, who had dinner chez Christie in the Sixties, recalled “the anti-Jewish flavour of the talk was not to be ignored or overlooked, or put down to heavy humour or generational prejudice. It was vividly unpleasant.” Should a mainstream documentary ever be brave enough to tackle this job, they should recall Suchet. Who would be better qualified than the son of a Jewish Lithuanian immigrant; a man who has spent a quarter of a century waxing Poirot’s moustache? Then, perhaps, we might solve the real mystery of Agatha Christie – how her work became so ubiquitous, and so unexamined.

Perspectives: The Mystery of Agatha Christie is on ITV on Sunday 17 March at 10.00pm